I went through all of my blogs to look at what reviews that I have as well as other landing pages and I found about 40 different offers that I have not bothered building at all. This is not Amazon book reviews or anything but instead are higher paying affiliate links to CJ, Linkshare, Clickbank, and Health Buy (Joe Bucks).

Having links in one place was very useful to me. When I get itching to build some content and write some articles I would be looking through the computer or blogs for the link I wanted to promote and often this would take longer than the actual writing of the article. Not Good.

You can just put the links to your money pages either in a spreadsheet or in just a text document with the link text that you would like to use as one string. You know how to set this up <a href=”http://pagename”>link text</a>. Once you have this you can drop it into a page easily without having to format

In order to change things up and become more profitable I have made a few changes lately that have made me more productive and working a lot better.

I talked about this in my last post but wanted to find a way to get myself productive and lately have been very singleminded about getting things to work better. To this end I have decided only to look at work as those critical pieces that will make a difference to my business. So what are the keys to my business?

Creating content
Creating backlinks to my content
Site Building

Everything else, and I really mean everything else is not really working but is instead not critical business stuff but is just secondary. Now we all know that we have to keep up to speed with our industry, research new topics, read news. But lets look at those critical three parts of building your income online.

Creating Content

Creating content to me just means that we type out content in some kind of word processor. My favorite is Notepad++ and this is just a notepad type program with no text editing features. Any windows machine has notepad anyway so that is good enough.

Some people are apt to work with Microsoft Word or some other word processor but this post that I ma writing now is just being drafted. I get info from my head onto paper and at the very most I will put the points in the top of the text document and at the least it is just freeform like now.

After I have drafted up my post I simply copy and paste it into Wordpress (Microsoft Word copy and pasting adds some crap to the Wordpress post so another reason not to use it). In Wordpress I use the spellchecking feature from Firefox to spellcheck (I suck) and then I find and add a pic and post it.

Creating Backlinks to my Content

The biggest way to create backlinks to content is to make sure delicious, digg, reddit, stumbleupon and others know about it. Also using Wordpress your content automatically pings all the major search engines so it will at least be included in the Google index quickly (usually in less than an hour).

To gain backlinks I usually repurpose my content by resubmitting my posts as articles to some of the big article directories as well.

Site Building

This is one place where there are good things to do and bd things that can suck up your valuable time. Creating your blog or site, adding plugins, optimizing your SEO are all good but if you spend all your time making your blog great and have no content to give the world then in is really just wasting time.

The way that I speed up this bloog building process up is by having a folder on my computer with all my favorite plugins, theme, and the Latest Wordpress install. I can create a new blog in 20 minutes from start to finish but without that magical content it may as well take an hour.

I hope that this post shows the critical way in which I have started to do my online business work. I have wasted hours and hours in the past even just tweaking a blog theme and to write an article like this takes only 20 minutes or so and makes a far bigger difference in my life than aesthetically fixing things. Don’t Waste You Life!!

So how would you be able to change you business overnight?

If I look at my day and what I actually achieve there is only one thing that really matters. Building backlinks to my content and building the content itself.

I have run across a couple of principles that are easy but true and that you can implement in your day planning or week planning and will give you more control.

The first principle is the 80/20 rule. We all know this rule but never really take advantage of it. Here is how you can take advantage of this right now. 80% of your income will come from only 20% of your content, pages, and sadly, your time. This means that all of that surfing for ideas. researching and everything else that is not building your personal inventory of links and content is wasted time. I spend a lot of time split testing, blog theme tweaking, and pissing around and I have to say that all of this time is completely wasted.

The second principle is the Parkinson Principle. The Parkinson Principle says that the more time that you give to a task the bigger that your mind makes it. We see this all of the time. You “research” a new niche, lets say dog training cause that one is oversaturated, and after a while you realize that you do not know much about it so you read forums, do keyword research, look for blog headers, go to the store to look at what there is for dog training and before you know it you have 150-200 subjects that you can write about. Well no one can write that much content at one time so you leave that and move on knowing that this is a great thing that you will have to get to when you have time.

Does that sound familiar, it is with me.

So this is what you need to do. Do the minimum instead of trying to get it all right. Right an article. post, or other content and don’t worry about the keyword density, write with just the end users problem in mind. If you already have a bunch of half finished blogs or domains just get some kind of content on them and then use Google Analytics tell you if the content was worth the 20 minutes or so to write it.

I have come to understand that it is not the lack of knowledge that holds you back but the sheer impossibility of putting any of your content up in a perfect state. Perfection is for the Olympics, or job is to get content up for people to see.

Do you know anything about the Know, Like and Trust method of getting closer to your clients and ultimately selling them?

We are always told that hate best way to get people to buy is to talk about them. This may often be true but in this day of text, podcast, and video marketing you have an opportunity to get everyone to see you as the source of the best information

Start a Relationship

Well there are three steps in your relationship with your buyers. The first step is to let them know you. You have to open up and let the people know that you are just like them, you came from the same humble beginnings and the show them snippets of what you did to become more successful. Whether you are in the fitness niche with the weight loss or muscle gain or the internet marketing niche coming from nothing and eventually striking it rich you are the same as them before and at the place that your buyer wants to be now.

Let your buyers like you

The second part is the like. Travis Sago is easily the best guy at getting the like going with hos stories and “aw shucks” southern friendliness as well as long folksy emails and salesletters. Travis to me is the greatest marketer as well as I am sure a very real and friendly guy. Frank Kern is another guy that just exudes that nice and freindly surfer down the beach kind of guy. What these guys do is disarm you. You know that you are going to be sold but that is ok since you know these guys really are not going to try and screw you to make a buck, you know that they have already made the buck and the their reputation is important to them.

Have your buyers trust you

Finally comes the trust. After you have let people know how you are and what you are you need to build that trust. I think that if you look around at a lot of the things that you see with John Reese (what is with these guru examples) I think that you get a guy that is down to earth and will just hit you with example after example of succeeding using his methods and after a while you defenses are worn down and you have to realize that if you invest with this guy there is no way that you can fail, he has done it so many times before and will do it so many times again that you can trust that it is really true for you as well.

This is where the whole list building comes in. Do you have a list? Do you just hope that the people that come to your page buy your product? The problem that you can run into is that as you get visitors to your site and try to sell them these people are cold to your message. What if you could talk to them a few times without selling to them and then after a relationship is built then you could get an offer in front of them. This would be so much more successful that you would want to put everyone into this sales funnel right away.

But you don’t

The reason that most people so not build the know, like, and trust is because the relationship takes time and we are all looking for a quick buck, a quick hit and the truth is that most of the time this never ever happens. Sure there are always going to be isolated examples of people that are using fantastic long form sales letters to do the know like and trust but it is almost impossible to get many people through this process.

What can you offer

So why is a list any different? Why would anyone want to join the list in the first place? Well for the bribe of course. You can’t sell your buyer the first time through but if your really understand your niche then you are going to be able to offer them something that they can not refuse, and ebook? A video program? and MP3? There are lots of offers that you can put free in front of someone in order to trade for their email address and the start of a relationship that will lead to you selling this buyer exactly what they are looking for. Th stretch in this idea is not too tough. Once you know what motivates your buyer to entrust you with their email address then you will be pretty close to knowing what they are likely to buy.

In between product launches though I tend to sometimes find little nuggets of stuff coming from Jeff Johnson and today I found a new one.

Most people like using Wordpress for the leverage that it can give you in the search angines. One of the great things with Wordpress is that you can make sitewide changes really easily by just using easy to use plugins and today I use All-in-one SEO to optimize all of my pages on all of my sites.

Anyway, getting back to what Jeff designed here. There is a new plugin that Jeff has had designed that leverages some of the plugins that you already use or can use in Wordpress and this new SEO plugin will optimize setting for some of your existing plugins. You can get the plugin here, and once you confirm your account and get the free plugin you install and run the wizrd and it will optimize your plugins and install of wordpress.

I have this plugin running on three of my best performing blogs that get a total of about 2000 visitors a day and will report back as to the difference in traffic that I get.

A few years back I was trying to do everything myself. I had my sites hosted for free on IIS and Apache at home and I used a free script for an autoresponder. Everything seemed to be working quite well but one of the many problems that I was running into was a crapload of work to try to understand the script, trying to make autporesponder messages work, testing messages and of course learning the copywriting that would get my messages read and sell the products that I was promoting.

In the end I realized that the two parts that were really taking up the most time in my business were the autoresponder learning curve and figuring out how to port scripts to my Windows install of apache and IIS.

I gave it up.

When I started telling my wife about wanting to get hosting and that is would cost us $10 per month and all the work I was doing getting my basement “free hosting” to work she thought I was crazy and we moved onto a real hosting company first I tried Your Site and then when I hit limitations I moved to 1 and 1 Internet to host my sites. I can now install wordpress, forums, subdomains, and I know that I have great uptime and linux server guys committed to keeping my sites as optimized as possible.

A few months later I used the same argument, or my wife used the same argument to me, that I should move to a proper paid autoresponder instead of a free autoresponder. In researching I found that the two most popular autoresponder systems were Aweber and Get Response. I opted for Get Response.

So what did I get with a paid autoresponder that I did not get with a free service? I didn’t have to deal with message formatting, I had guaranteed deliverability, I stopped needing to manually unsubscribe people, and best of all I now have a dozen autoresponders and all I need to do is decide what I want to send out and everything is taken care of by the pros that know how to make the service work. All for under $20 per month, that is not much of an investment considering how much you get.

Well this is a bit too manual for my taste and I am always looking at a way to automate any of my processes so that I am spending more time creating content and less time working on keyword research, lets face it most people, especially me will spend way more time looking for keywords and niches than creating content and I consider myself really good when creating a lot of content.

Micro Niche Finder vs Market Samurai

In looking for more tools I ran across Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder. Market Samurai seems to me anyway to be more focussed on finding Google Adwords keywords and Micros Niche Finder is more focussed on finding keywords and phrases for articles and affiliate blogs or landing pages. I know this is not fair at all becasue they both do the same thing just in different ways. Also Market Samurai costs $149 and Micro Niche Finder is only $97. I know that cost should not matter as both products will make you many more times their investment cost if you are to use them but I am again very cheap.

So I decided to buy Micro Niche Finder. Micros Niche Finder is an app that you buy and sits on your computer. The basic way that you will use Micro Niche Finder is to type in a keyword and then you will get results from Google on related keywords and phrases and can drill down right in the interface without andy manual processes, you can get the following for any and all of these keywords:

• Competition
• Competition quality
• Actual keywords searches
• Ezine Articles related to the keyword
• Clickbank Affiliate programs related to the keyword
• Affiliate program search for the keyword
• Hot Trends today
• Brainstorm random ideas
• LSI  (related keywords) search
• Google Trends search
• Licensed and unlicensed content related to keywords

How does Micro Niche Finder automation help you?

Some of these features open in a new window and some open within the app itself but the great thing about Micro Niche Finder is that all of your keyword competition and research is taking place within minutes instead of hours and then the app even gives you a way to reasrach the term to write better content that will give your readers the trust in your recomendation for affiliate products.

So how much does it cost to start an internet business from your basement. Well let’s look at what I think that you need. I thin k that these are real costs. Real to me and therefore realistic for anyone starting out.

Computer – Almost any computer will do. I have a three year old computer and all I wish I had more of was screen real estate. I look longingly at 30 inch LCD monitors but realistically the 17 inch monitor works fine.

Internet – I pay about $30 a month for my internet connection and can’t complain much about that. Dial up would even be good enough but in this day and age it is common for most people to have an internet connection

Hosting – First new cost for most people. Hosting is pretty cheap. I use 1and1 internet for my hosting and this costs me just under $10 per month. The hosting gives me 50 MySQL databases (good for Wordpress blogs or other apps), lots of storage, and apparently unlimited traffic. This is all good. The only problem with 1and1 internet is that anytime that I have had to call customer service it seems to be a hassle. I hope they are getting better with this but fortunately I don’t need to call more than once or twice a year for anything. Oh one more thing, the uptime is really good, my sites rarely go down.

There are lots of hosting companies but really the trouble is that often the gurus and others talk about setting up these all in one systems for $100 or $150 per month. I would never pay for that when a shared server at a big facility is all I need, and that is still all that I need.

Autoresponder – If you agree with most in that the money is in the list then there seems to be only two real choices for a list building and autoresponder service. Autoresponders cost between $15 and $20 per month, a lot at first but quickly this seems like a cheap cost.

I use Get Response and the only other company that offers this really is Aweber. Both services are good and allow you to create a list (empty at first) a signup box for people to get added to your list and then an editor to send messages, either one time emails or a whole autoresponder service. As I said these guys are both kind of the same, offer the same service and like features but I read a couple of reviews saying that GetResponse has better deliverability so that was why I chose them.

Originally I cheaped out and tried a free autoresponder script and in the forums I find that this is pretty common a free way to build a list. The trouble with this I found quickly. You can’t manage the people and send new messages as easily. The other problem is that you mail can get blocked easily or your whole site could easily be blocked by just 1 person calling you a spammer. The worst thing is that I spent probably 100 hours setting up and admining the free autoresponder script and this is time that I coupld have just used a service instead, you know the old adage trip over a dollar to pick up a dime. Do not use a free script for an autoresponder, bit the bullet and pay for one instead.

So in total, the fact that I already have a computer and internet means that I only have hosting and an autroresonder to deal with. My total cost for those two things for me is just under $28 a month. This is all it takes to compete with the big guys and to have a real site and real hardware and software out on the internet to get you going.

These are your core costs. I do not pay for anything else. I will post a new post about free tools that you can use for the rest of your business and I do not pay for any of those other services like Tell a friend scripts or other services.

I will instead pay for directory or article submissions occasionally and anything that will save me time for little money.

Well I may be a Chris Rempel fanboy….

Chris Rempel is a guy whos stuff I ran into a little while ago. Chris calls himself the Lazy Marketer and I think that he really isn’t but his processes are made to cut through all of the crap that we keep ourselves busy with and instead make sure that what we do is focussed on money making pursuits in affiliate marketing.

I have seen all of the product launches in internet marketing over the last 5 years or so and early on I was really sad that I could not buy them. Traffic Secrets, Butterfly Marketing, the Jeff Johnson stuff. But what I found after a while was that all of these $1000+ or even $2995 programs where mostly about the hype and tried to offer everything at the same time probably giving those poor buyers nothing but confusion and a lack of direction and a mad spouse.

Well that is another reason that I am liking Chris’s stuff All of the reports are only 12-30 pages and cost 10 to 20 bucks. I am really cheap and will read all of the free content on the internet but there is something speciual about buying a short, concise report that will teach you one thing well and give you an action plan so that you can start to make money right away.

I don’t know if I have done a very good job of selling you on the Chris Rempel Lazy Marketer system but if you want to see his nice short salespages these are the programs that I have bought so far.

Confessions of a lazy super affiliate

Confessions of a lazy super affiliate was actually a long read. This ebook was actually 62 pages and covers everything that is Chris’s lazy affiliate system. It was a long read and covered the following:

• Part 1: How to Identify and Tap Into Massive, Existing Demand
• Part 2: The Real Difference Between Making Pocket Change – or a Fortune
• Part 3: Instant, Free Traffic Has Never Been Easier…
• Part 4: The Honest Truth About SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Part 5: Drastically Increase Affiliate Income By Creating Your Own Products
• Part 6: Duplication Strategies For Multiplying Revenues Easily
• Conclusion: My Final Rant
• Resources: Tools of the Trade (Not the Usual Crap)

The chapter titles are really intriguing and the book itself was a long read for me as it deals with using a very step by step process for building many affiliate businesses. I took a couple of days to really get though this book and implemented it immediately.

The Conduit Method

I covered this in an earlier post when there was a great Webinar that I attended but the Conduit Method was able to work for me right away. I was lucky with the one of the first five products that I marketed and made about $1000 in the first three months of this year from just one review formatted correctly with some great backlinks. All covered in detail in the Conduit Method.

Here is what the Conduit Method book covers in only 13 pages:

Introduction – Why “Conventional” Affiliate Marketing is Hard
Part 1 – The Conduit Method – Explained
Part 2 – The Conduit Method – Shooting Fish in a Barrel
Part 3 – The Conduit Method – How To Get Started NOW
Part 4 – Some Technical Considerations & Suggestions

The book costed me $14.95 and even as cheap as I am I found the book great. I always feel nervous about short books but really I could put out a book full of crap and make is over a couple hundred pages and still not cover anything well. Chris has a whole system in 13 pages that you can read and understand in an hour and create a site based on this new knowledge within a night.

Fantastic stuff that Chris offers.

So after reading this post I hope you can see now why I am a Chris Rempel fanboy.

OK, so you have probably seen the commercial but to know a bit about Vince I also found an interview that he did with CNBC a while back.

I really hated Sham Wow guy the first couple times that I saw the commercial, he seems to be a huckster and really aggresive in selling his product. Now that I have watched the commercial lots of times and had my daughter like it a lot I now have a different view of the whole phenomenon.

People hate to be sold and always have their guard up to a sales pitch, at least I tend to be that way. I think that Vince brings this to another level. We all know what a commercial is supposed to do, sell us it’s product, and instead of working on a buyers emotions Vince is really coming right out and selling hard, and aggressivly, selling benefits and features at the same time and this has apparently been very popular.

Another effective tool that Vince uses is the lower quality video and talking to the camera man, fast, and again showing the features like he is selling steak knives in the 80s.

Take a look at the video again and see what you think as a salesperson and marketer and not a buyer. It is really great